Chapter Text
Roman Sanders woke up on Saturday.
Then he woke up on Saturday again.
And, unfortunately, that was where the problems began.
Day One
Nothing unusual happened.
Roman went to the café. Ordered his usual drink. Annoyed Virgil for approximately twenty-three minutes with various theatrical remarks. Sent him exactly six terrible memes. Got threatened with bodily harm.
A perfectly successful morning.
The rest of the day passed entirely uneventfully. Roman went to sleep, completely expecting to wake up to a quiet Sunday morning.
Day Two
Roman woke up. Looked at his phone. Looked again. Then spent ten full minutes staring blankly at the lock screen.
Saturday.
Still. The exact same Saturday. The exact same text messages waiting for him. The exact same cloudy afternoon weather. The exact same everything.
Roman's first reaction was profound confusion. His second reaction was intense artistic curiosity. His third reaction, spoken aloud to his empty dorm room, was:
“Well. This seems medically concerning.”
He went through the day anyway, treating it like a bizarre, vivid lucid dream. Just to see what would happen.
Day Three
Roman became aware of a terrible, suffocating possibility.
The possibility being: this was not a dream. Time was fundamentally broken, and he was the only one who noticed.
The panic began shortly afterward.
Day Four
The existential crisis happened in a Walgreens.
To be fair, Roman had not intended to have an existential crisis in a Walgreens. It just so happened that after waking up to a fourth identical Saturday, he had panicked, grabbed his keys, and started driving. He drove forty-five minutes straight out of town, desperate to find a city where the date changed, where the newspapers said something else, where the loop couldn't reach him.
Instead, he hit an invisible wall of pure repetition. The next town over was stuck in the exact same temporal amber.
The Walgreens had simply been the immediate vicinity when his sanity finally collapsed. One moment he was holding a bag of generic gummy bears, and the next, he was sitting flat on the linoleum floor of Aisle Seven, staring at a wall of shampoo, contemplating the terrifying nature of reality.
A concerned employee in a blue vest asked if he needed assistance.
Roman looked up, his eyes wide and completely unhinged, and informed them that time itself had permanently stopped.
The employee slowly backed away and left the aisle. A perfectly reasonable response, honestly.
Days Five Through Eight
Investigation. Research. Theories. Conspiracy boards.
Three separate, increasingly desperate attempts to convince Logan with flawless, mathematical logic. Two heartbreaking attempts to convince Patton over a plate of resetting chocolate chip cookies. One deeply regrettable attempt to corner a philosophy professor during his office hours.
None of them worked. Nobody remembered. Nobody believed him. Nobody stayed aware once the clock struck midnight.
Saturday continued. Relentlessly.
Days Nine Through Twelve
Roman stopped trying to solve the loop every single second of the day. Not because he had given up—Roman Sanders never surrendered—but because sheer, bone-deep mental exhaustion eventually won.
Life continued. Or, at least, whatever lonely approximation of life existed inside an endless Saturday.
He still went to the café. He still ordered his latte. Only now, he started messing with the timing. Sometimes he showed up early at 9:45, just to see if it changed anything. Sometimes he dragged his feet and didn't stroll in until past 11:00.
But no matter when he arrived, he still annoyed Virgil. He still sent the memes. He still spent twenty-three minutes occupying the exact same small table by the window.
The familiarity of it helped. It felt normal. And normal had quickly become a luxury Roman couldn't afford.
Days Thirteen Through Fourteen
Roman realized something deeply alarming.
The absolute best part of his endless day was no longer the coffee. It was the sharp, sarcastic barista behind the counter. Virgil was the only anchor keeping him from drifting entirely into the void.
This terrifying realization was immediately ignored. Successfully. Mostly.
Day Fifteen
Something changed.
At first, Roman couldn't quite identify it. The day looked identical. The weather matched. The morning text messages matched. The café layout matched. Everything was perfectly, maddeningly in place.
And yet. Something felt entirely different.
Virgil seemed completely distracted. Not obviously—not to the rest of the oblivious customers—but to Roman. Virgil stared at the wall clock significantly longer than usual. He completely forgot someone's espresso order. He looked mildly unsettled, his shoulders drawn up tight throughout his entire shift.
Roman noticed. Because Roman always noticed everything about him.
He considered asking if Virgil was okay, then decided against it. If Virgil wanted to complain about a bad mood, he would. Roman left the café at 10:26 that morning. The strange, lingering feeling followed him all day.
Day Sixteen
The feeling got worse.
Virgil looked exhausted. Not physically, but existentially. Roman recognized the specific, haunted look in his eyes instantly—mostly because he had stared at that exact same look in his own mirror on Day Three.
The suspicion formed immediately in his chest. Impossible. Ridiculous. Highly unlikely.
Roman spent the rest of the day desperately trying not to hope. The disappointment would kill him if he was wrong.
Day Seventeen
Virgil wasn't at work.
Roman knew this because he arrived at the café at exactly 10:03 AM, and Virgil wasn't standing behind the counter. The immediate realization hit him significantly harder than expected.
“Where's Virgil?” he asked, trying to keep his voice casual.
Remy looked up from his phone, popping his gum. “Sick, I think. Called out.”
Roman’s stomach dropped through the floorboards. Not because Virgil was sick—people didn't actually get sick in a resetting loop unless they started the morning that way.
Roman dropped his hands into his pockets, a sudden, blinding certainty washing over him. The exact same certainty he'd felt on Day Three.
Virgil was in the loop. He had to be. He was currently processing the horror of his own Day Three.
Roman spent the rest of that Saturday trying not to get excited. Trying not to get his hopes up. Trying not to imagine what it would actually mean if he wasn't entirely alone in a broken universe anymore.
He failed spectacularly.
Day Eighteen
Roman arrived at the café at 10:03 AM. Exactly.
For the first time in nearly three weeks, he deliberately, calculatedly ordered the wrong thing.
“Green tea,” he said smoothly.
Virgil's hands paused on the counter. He immediately looked up, his eyes narrowing into a sharp, deeply suspicious glare.
Roman nearly laughed aloud right then and there. Good. Very good. Incredibly promising.
The tension stretched between them, thick and heavy. Neither of them said a word. Finally, Roman took pity on both of them, leaning his elbows on the counter with a soft, careless, and secretly terrified smile.
“So, Emo Nightmare. Where were you yesterday?”
A beat. Another breathless beat.
Then, Virgil leaned in, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Which yesterday? Friday? Or the same Saturday?”
Relief crashed into Roman so violently he genuinely forgot how to breathe. It wasn't just a guess. It wasn't a fluke.
Eighteen endless, repetitive, impossible Saturdays. And finally—finally—someone else remembered.
Instead of shouting or making a scene, Roman simply leaned against the counter, let his smile widen into something genuine, and allowed himself to fully enjoy the warmth of the moment. Because for the first time since the universe broke, the crushing weight was gone.
“Finally,” Roman said softly, his voice trembling just a fraction.
Virgil stared at him, stunned.
Roman’s smile turned bright, warm, and entirely unshakeable. “I'm not alone.”
— ✦ —
Looking back much later—long after Sunday had finally arrived and the world had started moving forward again—Roman would loudly insist to anyone who asked that the most important thing he'd gained from the time loop was perspective. Or personal growth. Or emotional maturity. All of which were absolute lies, of course.
The most important thing he'd gained was another person who remembered him. The second most important thing was realizing that said person was Virgil. The fact that those two things eventually became entirely impossible to separate was, apparently, somebody else's problem. Preferably Future Roman's